On the topic of kneeling/taking communion in a catholic church…I was raised catholic but havent seen the inside of a church for a service in about 15 years or so. I recently attended a family funeral where I sang all the songs and did all the rituals. My family also had to sit in the front row of the church since my mother is the oldest of 7children. In addition, my father and cousin and uncle all had to carry the ‘gifts’ to the altar as part of the service. Three of us in that group were atheists. When it came time for communion all three of us received it. The person who died valued their catholic faith and it was better to do my duty to their memory in both taking the offertory to the altar and in taking communion. I saw it more as being part of the family sharing a ritual and doing my proper duty than in avowing or affirming any belief. If I had made a scene by not kneeling, or not taking communion it would have damaged the ceremony. There is definitely a time and a place. For example, I never bow my head at prayer before meal time.

He is not being racist or a xenophobe. His is using the term to describe the origin or style of the cold reading that is used. He is not saying the Roma are crooks or bad people. Is it racist to say a burrito is Mexican food?

I wouldn’t feel compelled to say anything if he hadn’t felt the need to be so free with the word g***y. I wouldn’t be posting this comment if he had stuck with “Romani.”

When you use a slur, you aren’t just describing the individual person or people you upset with, the word you used impugns a whole group of people. No matter how mad I was at an individual black person or an individual Latino person, no matter how genuinely terrible the person I was talking about might be, I would not use a fucking racial slur to describe them.

I can’t even imagine myself calling someone n*****, w******, or anything else like that (including g****), no matter how angry I got. Words like that aren’t words you use if you “aren’t racist” or genuinely don’t have any issues with the way you see the group being referred to.

Sure, sometimes people make mistakes and don’t realize words are slurs. Cecil and Tom have done this sometimes, but they always come back and say that . They always acknowledge it. Not only does DJ not acknowledge this, he make a flippant little comment about how being expected to not use slurs to describe the Romani people was “PC.”

Ah, yes, political correctness. That terrible thing where society expects you not to treat people like shit because of factors out of their control such as race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.

Like, do you even know what the fuck is going on in Europe right now, happening to the Romani people? And DJ is going to throw slurs around like these attitudes aren’t legitimately getting people beaten, killed and thrown out of their homes?

Yes, the people in question are horrible.
No, that doesn’t justify using a slur that impugns everyone who happens to share an ethnicity with them.

As a preface, my use of asteriks and analogs for slurs is not to be construed as an opinion that everyone needs to do the same. I know there are varying views on this, I just find them to be conventions I prefer.

I think there are two questions here,

Is it recognized on the same level as, ahem “n*****r” , a word which reduced a grown reporter to panic when Samuel L Jackson insisted he say it before they could talk about it? A word that most people can’t even bring themselves to say or write, even when discussing it academically, unlike even almost all other recognized slurs that i can think of? (I think recall a republican senator called someone or some someones “w*****k(s)” not too long ago, an no one had a problem using that word to describe the incident.)

So no. Alas, no slur but the word itself is on the same level as “n*****e” in (polite) US society. I believe it is uniquely avoided. I think perhaps you didn’t consider this when you chose it as an example as it is not a good candidate for an honest comparison to absolutely anything else.

I realize that all this hatred of Romani seems to be newly happening in a world where people actually care about such things. The “Redskins” team name would never be coined as a name if they were trying to do it in the here and now. And that’s a good thing. The show you talk about has actually gotten a lot of criticism for both the use of the word Gypsy and for caricaturing or perpetuating negative stereotypes. I like to think they wouldn’t make that either, if they had it to do over again.

I guess my thing is that I don’t think it’s a big ask? I’m not Romani, so I don’t get to decide what words are slurs towards the Romani people, so when I get corrected I should just agree. It is literally no skin off of my nose at all to stop using a word that means nothing to me but is harmful to other people.

DJ has clearly already been told, judging from his flippant snark towards being “PC,” and just doesn’t care. DJ just knows he is a good person so it can’t be wrong when he uses it. When other people tell him a thing he did was racist, it causes cognitive dissonance with the fact that he just knows that he is not racist, which causes his indignant rejection of the entire idea complete with aforementioned snark.

Really, don’t underestimate cognitive dissonance when it comes to these issues. Almost no one has a self image that says they are “a racist, ” and the urge to defense/rejection of the very idea you could have said or done something racist is strong enough to make people completely blind to even very blatant things. My father, the last time I visited him, complained about how “The Blacks are going crazy!,” paused, and then said, “Now I know that sounds racist, but it isn’t.” And I know from more than two decades of experience that he sincerely believes he isn’t racist even when he’s saying the N-word and scrutinizing interracial couples on the street to make sure the white woman “is OK”.

Obviously my father is farther out there than most people, but if even he can be totally convinced that he’s not racist I think we should all be skeptical of our inevitably self-defensive reactions when people tell us we’ve done something wrong.

So when I was first told about the nature of the word g***y, I did feel the same way as I suppose DJ feel now. I felt very defensive about it, and it took me a while to walk myself around my cognitive bias . After that, I stopped using it in general, and changed the title of something I had written which included the word. My hands didn’t blacken and fall off, the skies didn’t rain blood. It will be similar for DJ I suppose, if he ever gets around to it.

Well admittedly it was more of a joke that anything else. And really YOU are the one who compared the two, not me. “I can’t even imagine myself calling someone n*****, w******, or anything else like that (including g****)” I’m still not sure what the w word is.

I’m not going to try to defend DJ on this. He’s a adult, he can defend his own actions. I had no idea that it was a controversial term until DJ said something. I always thought of it as the small g version of the word: One inclined to a nomadic, unconventional way of life. Race had nothing to do with it, it was more a lifestyle. I see that it bothers people so I’ll stop (not sure I’ve really even said it much but I’ll avoid it in the future) I will say that I can’t find anything but tumblr articles and blogs that say it is a slur. No dictionary sites and even wikipedia doesn’t list it as such. Wikipedia lists: Gyppo, gippo, gypo, gyppie, gyppy, gipp but says, ” “Gypsy” is not in itself an ethnic slur but its usage is sometimes controversial.”

This has nothing to do with any of the topics, I just wanted to share it. The video should start at 1:09:26, which is where Douglas Adams starts talking about early humans and goes into his puddle analogy. http://youtu.be/_ZG8HBuDjgc?t=1h9m26s
The entire video is a worth a watch, if you have an hour and a half.

I was raised as a catholic but have been an atheist for 10 years. Whenever I have gone to church since then I have sat quietly without participating in the communion, hymn singing or call and response that is pretty popular at catholic mass. It’s kind of like an orgasm, faking it is just insulting to everyone involved.

I found the ‘do you stand up?’ question very interesting, as I am paraplegic so have never faced that particular dilemma. I can say that it’s always a little awkward when everyone else is standing though…

I have been to a few funerals since I became an atheist, one which was held last week, and all of them (bar the last one) have been more uncomfortable because of the sentiments that are expressed during the service that I don’t believe in over the logistics of whether I sing/pray etc. The last funeral I went to, the priest said something along the lines of ‘not everyone here shares the same beliefs or faith, but what we can share is our grief and sorrow at this persons death and the value of their contribution to our lives’. It was amazing to have grief acknowledged and not just dismissed with ‘eternal life’ or ‘God’s plan’. I was very impressed.

Wow. WTF, DJ Grothe? Using the term “gypsy” is a pejorative. This sounds bigoted, especially when DJ refers to the people as if they are all exactly the same: “the women do this, the men do that”. He then speaks very disparagingly about the women’s big hair and long fingernails, as if that somehow (?) made them even worse. Just straight-up sexist ad hominems. I was disappointed that Tom and Cecil didn’t call him out on this shit. I have heard elsewhere that he has said some sexist things, but never heard it myself before this. Not what I look for in a leader. Yuck.